Hi,

There is no official controller support for this game.

You will have to play it with mouse and keyboard for best results.

Hope this answer helps and if so please mark it as solution.

Better later them never. I suggest Antimicro, I've been playing old games with it, like the Legacy of Kain series. Never tried with Advent Rising but you could give a try.
https://github.com/AntiMicro/antimicro/releases

Although old, for reference to anyone in the future:

One way, is to go into the config file and disable joystick. Then use any controller binding application to bind the keyboard keys and mouse (including mouse movement) to the controller. You can then play just fine on any controller.

Edit: ^ I did find more recently that my controller has a slight on and off drift and needs some deadzone set and may have been present here before custom binding. I didn't re-test, but If the game's official controller use doesn't offer full controls, the following can be done for full controls on the controller. If all you want is deadzone, that can always be set in 3rd party controller software.

Depending on the controller binding application, you can fully bind all keys to the controller to fully play the game from it. The digit keys are fully used (up to and including "-" key) and to bind that requires using a multi bind and multi button setup. So, tap bind, hold bind, and I use hold on digit 3 with two buttons plus d-pad to use digits 4+. Because the d-pad only has 4 buttons, I split over two hold buttons to get up to 8 key binding use.

I did this with DS4Windows and PS5 controller. Not perfect, but works well, and finished the game with it.